Ecommerce Tips For Halloween & Black Friday

There are some approaching holidays that each year turn into an eCommerce madness right before the preparations start. One of them is the holiday that has taken over the October mood: Halloween. And the other is the most famous Friday in the world: Black Friday.

If you are an eCommerce store owner and the craze of these holidays has you wondering how to do great, there are a few things you need to take under consideration for your web store this holiday season.

halloween eCommerce Ideas for Your Web Store

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

With each passing year, the excitement before this holiday is growing bigger and bigger. People of all ages find themselves in search of the perfect costume, the perfect home decoration, and the perfect ways, events even, to spend the spookiest night of the whole year.

And here comes the moment where you as a web store owner take advantage of this. Whatever eCommerce store you’re running – whether it’s a dress shop, accessories shop, outdoor decoration shop or a kitchen supply shop, we’ve got some good content marketing ideas for you this Halloween, which has proved to work before.

Create A Halloween Newsletter

Now is the time to send out all the awesome deals you’re offering for the holiday. Even if you aren’t offering any costumes, you can spookify this month’s special edition of your newsletter with a few of the ideas you’ll find below.

For a good content of your newsletter, especially if you’re trying to reach to a crowd of Halloween lovers, you can definitely include ghost stories, which will poke your customers’ interest.

You may include haunted history facts but beware that you have to specially select the recipients because a location-focused history fact will work better. For example, if you’re sending out to Denmark, the reader will be happier to read more of Denmark’s haunted history facts. This way you’ll give them an idea for a prank or better yet – a costume related to their own country’s history.

At the end of your newsletter, you can always point out a few Halloween decoration, food or party ideas. Relate them to the deals you’re offering in your own eCommerce store and don’t forget to link back to your products/store.

Engaging Social Media Content

Photo by Daniele Riggi on Unsplash

If in addition to an online retail store, you also own a brick-and-mortar shop, this is the perfect opportunity for you to organize a community Halloween contest.

One way to do this is to organize a costume contest. It’s the typical game during this time of the year but it always works. Claim a prize for the one who dressed best at your shop and engage social media in this as well – with prize teasers at first then after the contest is over entertain your followers with pictures from the contest.

Scavenger hunts are also great for engaging people on social media. What you can do is hide a gift card somewhere around the city near a public historical or notable sight, take a photo of it and post it on social media and let the hunt for the prize begin. You’ll engage your followers in a game, which we all love.

And of course, if you want to be even crazier you can always organize a pumpkin throwing contest and post the most absurd pictures online. Craziness brings traction in almost all cases.

make sure your product data is in order

During seasonal campaigns, it is incredibly important to be wise about the product information management system you use. Be sure it’s a platform that’s convenient for you to manage your products because exactly during these times it’s important to be smart about them.

You’ll need to think about linking your products correctly (I’m talking about cross-sell, up-sell and related products) and you’ll need to put them in the right category for the season (like now – Halloween). For example, if you offer a black dress, be sure to assign it with a matching Halloween necklace or if you offer a Wonder Woman costume, you’ll have to assign a cross-sell product which might be a Wonder Woman special make-up.

So, it’s important to use a proper product information management system for your eCommerce store in order to ease your work during seasonal campaigns.

Halloween Details for your Ecommerce Store

If this holiday is all about dressing up, you’ve got to consider the same for your web store.

Add something spooky to your logo on your website and even consider adding this spooky detail to your social media profiles and perhaps the special edition of your newsletter.

Also, an idea for fixing up your web store is adding a pointer to all the deals you offer. Our suggestion is little monster feet who lead to all the spooky sales and your new and exclusive Halloween treats.

Now, if you’re a kitchen-supply eCommerce store or cooking-related, we propose you add Halloween recipes to your web store. It’s a guarantee that your customers will appreciate this initiative from your side.

Overall, be an entertainer. This holiday is all about the fun that people love having. Post related articles, link your products inside, provide your customers with special deals and be sure to communicate this with them. Be initiative and they will respond back with interest and the end goal – a purchase.

Black Friday – E-commerce Madness And How To Prepare For It

Black Friday is an approaching yearly madness for the commerce world. Every year on this day thousands of brick-and-mortar shops are attacked by possessed shoppers, who have their expectations set on huge discounts.

And even though physical shops are the ones stealing the attention on Black Friday, online retailers have an increasing number of shoppers, too. Statistics even show that last year eCommerce sales were up.

According to Adobe Analytics, last year U.S. retailers earned a record $7.9 billion on Nov. 24, an increase of nearly 18% from 2016 (source).

Here’s how to prepare for it.

The Ultimate Ecommerce Friend: Social Media

You will need to increase your presence in social media during the holiday season. Pay for online ads and banners and make them go live as soon as possible. Be sure to include your discounted items so you attract more attention. After all, this is what this holiday is all about.

Send a special e-mail to your list that is all about sales. Grab their attention with an engaging heading that will make them click and include teasers about what you’ll have discounted in your store during the holiday. You don’t have to go out of your style of design just for this campaign. You can match it to how you usually make your newsletters, just make it a bit more engaging this time.

If you’re wondering about Instagram and how to do great there, check out this article, which will help you about the social media in general.

Promote coupons of discount on social media like Twitter and Facebook. You can make a game to gain more attention to your E-commerce store. A proper one is “whoever shares they get a discount coupon”. And be sure to post your items on sale on social media, as well.

The Perfect Landing Page

The most important thing you need to take care of is your Black Friday Landing Page. It’s the first thing your customers see and exactly on this day they care about one thing – discounts. They don’t waste time to search for your items on sale through your web store, so what you have to do is point everything you want to point at the very beginning.

You can make a grabbing-the-attention image with sales and perhaps a good idea is to include a countdown clock. This will call customers to action. Create arrows (or something of this kind) on your web store that points to items on sale. If you are using Magento, there are a lot of extensions to help you with this in Magento Connect.

If you have the option for a discount code, make sure to put it on your landing page, as well. And remember – most of what you sell on this day depends on your landing page. Make it a good one and make sure to include everything above. We chose one of BullGuard’s Black Friday landing pages for a good example.

Handling the extra traffic

There is no doubt that if you follow these pieces of advice, your eCommerce store will endure a lot of traffic. You have to make sure that you are prepared for this unless you want your site going down at the most valuable shopping time of the year.

Make sure all your plugins are up to date and also an important thing is to back up your information somewhere in case of your store crashing down.

Clean up your cache – this will improve the speed of your eCommerce store and thus it will improve the user experience of your customers. If they have to wait a lot for a discount page to load, they’ll be out of there on the third second.

We don’t advise you to use a low-cost server during Black Friday. Take note of this and search for a better one.

And one of the most important things – improve the mobile performance of your E-commerce store. In times when most people shop online on their mobile devices, you can’t risk with a slow or mobile unfriendly website.

Don’t panic! The most important thing on Black Friday is discounts. All you have to do is lead your customers to them and watch those shopping carts ship themselves.